I set down my flashlight, pried up one of the floor stones with the crowbar, and then went to work with the sledgehammer. I took out my anger and frustration on the cement. Pretty soon sweat was running down my face and dripping inside my glasses. The labor made my muscles ache. I’d been on soft mommy duty for too long so blisters formed on my hands.
Once the concrete was smashed, I hooked the iron box with the crowbar and dragged it out. It weighed a ton. I thought I was going to pop a blood vessel, but you know there is some truth in those old wives’ tales about desperate moms being strong enough to lift a car off their baby. I started smashing open the nested boxes.
When they were finally opened, the thing inside—the thing I’d taken such trouble to protect—was just sitting there, looking innocent. It really didn’t seem like much, just a hunk of stone, old and dusty, about the size of a deck of cards with slightly ragged edges.
It was so much more than that. It was a weapon created by beings beyond our understanding, from another dimension or before time or who the hell knows, and left here to really mess us up.
The power of this thing had also given me back my life… I realized that I’d unconsciously moved one hand to the black marks on my neck, and then I quickly snatched my hand away. It had changed me in ways that I couldn’t even begin to understand, except that those changes had saved my life from mortal wounds a couple of times now. But I wasn’t about to thank it. Everything supernatural came with a price. I was sure it would make me pay with interest.
During my pregnancy, we’d been deathly afraid that the artifact would change little Ray, make him into something not human. That hadn’t happened but—but now it might cost me little Ray himself.
With shaking hands, I got the artifact out. It felt like a boring old chunk of stone. As usual, nothing weird happened when I touched it. I wasn’t one of those special people who could use it to blow up the world. I was just the poor sap who’d been drafted to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. I checked the time. He would be calling me back soon.
Now that it was physically in my possession, my mind recoiled even harder at the idea of giving it away. I wondered how much of that feeling was me, and how much of it was the curse that had made me responsible for it. I took a deep, shaky breath. Spell or no spell, first I’d take care of my family. After that…I’d do what I could to keep the artifact safe.
As I turned to leave, my flashlight beam fell on something I’d almost forgotten. In a corner of the room there was a big stainless steel container which glimmered under the light. It had been a right pain to get that container down here just because of the size. It had warning stickers on it, but unlike my booby trap signs, these were from the factory: Danger, medical waste, and danger, liquid nitrogen.
I’d written a letter explaining everything to Owen or Earl, or whoever survived me and eventually found this place, because if they opened the container and saw what was inside they would be really confused. The Kumaresh Yar wasn’t the only thing I’d smuggled back from New Zealand. The envelope containing that letter was in front of the container and labeled Read This.
It gave me an idea. I was probably going to have to drop the artifact through the portal rope to who knows where before I could get my baby. The kidnapper was sure to be jamming things like tracking devices, so I could be sending the thing off to Antarctica for all I knew. Once it went through that rope I’d never find it…but the thing in the container on the other hand… The kidnapper would be on the lookout for electronic tracking devices, not biological ones.
It was an idea so crazy it might just work. Or it might turn out horribly. But I was desperate and running out of time. So I unscrewed the cap. Normally you had to top this stuff off every so often, but I’d paid a whole lot of money to an elf to stick a rune on the lid to ensure endless cold. There was a hiss and a bunch of white vapor as the freezing liquid nitrogen hit the atmosphere. Then I dumped the contents on the floor.
It was a frozen black blob, only about the size of a hamster. Almost immediately, I started having doubts about the wisdom of this.
As the nitrogen evaporated in tendrils around the blob, all I could think was that he was dead or, if not dead, completely ineffective. He’d still been alive when I’d frozen him. Or at least, the tiny, partially-burned-to-ash piece of him I’d found stuck in my body armor had been alive. I think it had even tried to communicate…right before I’d dunked him in liquid nitrogen. Where was the—limited—intelligence of an amorphic creature housed? And if it was a matter of mass, would this little lump be literally brainless?
The blob didn’t move for a minute, and I didn’t have minutes to spare. Okay, so that plan was a dud. I needed to get outside because I doubted I would get a cell phone signal down here. The fact that tears were stinging in my eyes was just a sign of how many shocks I’d withstood recently. I was certainly not crying for a servant of the Old Ones, even one who’d been a childhood friend.
I was just about to turn away when the blob wiggled a bit. From the little black lump a tendril extruded, a baby-blue eyeball appeared on the end of it, and the blob asked me a question with a tiny little squeak of a voice.
“Cuddle Bunny?”
Chapter 6
One of the things I really hate about intelligent monsters and the kinds of bad guys who work for them is that they’re creepy all the time. They never give it a rest. You know, they can’t arrange a meeting at Sunny Street or Happy Fields. No, anything to do with them will be in Mount Gloomy or Darkness Alley.
Even so, I groaned under my breath as I entered the address into my GPS: Crybaby Bridge. I knew the place. MHI had caught a bubak at that site.
What is a bubak? Ah…
People joke that every small town in the US has a legend about a crybaby bridge. There’s always some story to go with it too, a dark tale of infidelity and illegitimacy, and of a baby who was born only to be killed by its mother or father, or some stranger who’d absconded with it because of its origins. The standard legend was that on certain nights, but particularly when the moon was full, you could still hear the ghost of the baby crying under the bridge.
Like most such legends, it wasn’t exactly wrong. What often happened, in fact, was a bubak, a kind of Czech boogeyman, had set up shop there. They loved to make a noise imitating a helpless infant, to lure would-be rescuers to the dark place under the bridge, where the bubak could then eat them.
While a bubak was dangerous and ugly as sin, looking like a ghoulish, green version of a scarecrow, they really weren’t that dangerous comparatively. But, yep, that was exactly where the creature who’d taken my baby wanted me to meet him.
“That bastard,” I muttered under my breath.
Two eyes on tentacles pushed out of the bag where I’d stowed Mr. Trash Bags, “Cuddle Bunny mad?”
I looked down at the tiny shoggoth, and he looked back at me with an adoring expression. I turned my eyes back on the road. “Yes. Very mad.”
I’m not going to complain about my childhood. I’m a Shackleford and there were more important things for my family than making sure a little girl has play friends. I was older than my brothers, and there had been no other kids around. Back then we didn’t even have the orc village. I remembered endless days of playing in the woods near the house, making up stories and entertaining myself, while my parents were busy with much more important business.
Again, not complaining. I’d been very able to keep myself amused. And when I was four I could read and then make up stories off the stories I read. Most of the time when I was playing alone in those woods, I’d been conquering fantasy kingdoms, exploring the wilder parts of Earth, and taking spaceships to unknown planets.
But every kid needs friends, and for the longest time when I was little, I’d thought I’d had a play friend named Mr. Trash Bags. Granted, most children’s imaginary friends didn’t look like a pile of black trash bags with lots of eyes, but I’d been a weird kid. I remembered Mr. Trash Bags very clearly, ho
w sweet and friendly he’d been, and how he’d played all the parts I assigned him in my play scripts. He would play monster or friendly rescuer, and he’d even play stuffed animal. And it always ended in hugs.
Then one day he had just disappeared.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I had found out Mr. Trash Bags was neither imaginary nor…well, nor something you’d want around your kids.
You see, Mr. Trash Bags was a shoggoth, the manual-labor and odd-job slaves of the Old Ones. They run errands, eat people, dig tunnels, and so on. Some guy who went by the charming name of the Mad Arab said that “To look upon their hideous thousand eyes is to invite horror and the suffering of infinite madness, within tombs of blackness where the innocent are devoured for eternity.” So on and so forth.
Shoggoths are amorphous. They change shape, but they’re normally about fifteen feet across and weigh around two tons. They talk, after a fashion, but they’re never going to win any prizes for eloquence. And they eat everything.
Except Mr. Trash Bags hadn’t eaten me. For whatever reason he’d taken a liking to four-year-old Julie Shackleford. And when we’d met again, a few years ago, in a showdown between me and the death cult who commanded him, he had chosen to side with me. In payback for his treachery, Mr. Trash Bags had been burned to ash.
Well, except for this damaged little chunk that I’d found afterward, seemingly still alive.
I could have finished the job. He was a shoggoth after all. Any of my teammates would have. But Shacklefords pay their debts and don’t desert allies. However, I couldn’t just leave him free to roam. Nobody knows much about shoggoth physiology. I didn’t know if he would grow back to giant size, and if he did… Well, Mr. Trash Bags loved me personally, but he was still a shoggoth. Which meant he would go back to running errands for the Old Ones, digging tunnels, and most of all eating everything, including people. Which I couldn’t allow him to do.
So I’d frozen him.
But with all my friends gone, and me alone and facing a threat to my baby, I could use something that could run errands for me and, well…eat whoever I told him to eat. It was probably the desperation talking, but having a friendly shoggoth sounded like a great idea at the time.
As I drove toward the meet, I tried to fill in my new, tiny ally. “Cuddle Bunny is angry at people who took away my bab—her cuddle bunny.”
The two little blue eyes on tentacles crossed. “Cuddle Bunny has cuddle bunny?”
It was weird. The last time we’d spoken Mr. Trash Bags’ voice had been extremely, violently loud. Now he sounded like a cartoon character, but to be fair, Martin Hood had burned a few thousand pounds off him.
“Yes. I have a little cuddle bunny. He’s very small and helpless, and bad men took him away.” I left aside the complexities that these probably weren’t exactly men, and there was no way the guy I’d been talking to on the phone was human. But the thing was that Mr. Trash Bags had never exactly been a genius, and being frozen for years couldn’t have improved his mental performance.
I have no illusions. Shoggoths are still bad guys, the enforcers for the Old Ones, but Mr. Trash Bags loved me, and could be an enforcer for me. At least potentially. Hopefully. I was heading into a meeting with really bad guys, guys who probably wouldn’t hesitate to pull a double cross. My only ace in the hole was a hamster-sized, recently unfrozen Mr. Trash Bags. And I planned to use him.
I reached over and grabbed Mr. Trash Bags—a warm pulsating blob in my hand—and yes, he did say “whee” as I grabbed him and shoved him into the pouch which held the artifact. The blue eyes looked up at me, confused, and a tentacle reached out to pat my hand.
I looked at the GPS and left the highway at the required exit. I was driving fast and it was still going to be tight. I hated this. The kidnapper’s deadlines were keeping me reacting instead of acting. If he kept me moving, it minimized my chances of getting help, or having time to prepare, or getting anyone to the meet early. He’d given me the expected instructions: come alone, come unarmed, or else. I hate smart monsters.
“The bad men want me to give them the artifact in there. So they can give me my baby.”
“Cuddle Bunny Cuddle Bunny!” the little shoggoth squeaked.
“Right. And I’m afraid they’ll take it but not give me the baby. Or they’ll use the artifact to hurt me.”
The eyes looked slitty. “No hurt Cuddle Bunny! Or Cuddle Bunny Cuddle Bunny.”
Really, for Mr. Trash Bags this was genius. We were firmly in the realm of nuclear physics as far as Mr. Trash Bags was concerned. “We have to protect my Cuddle Bunny at all costs, or I can’t love Mr. Trash Bags anymore.”
Another eye joined the other two, and the tentacle wrapped around my wrist. “Cuddle Bunny love Mr. Trash Bags?”
“I sure do. But it is very important to me that you protect my Cuddle Bunny.” The little eyes looked so sad; I felt awful using emotional blackmail on the little eldritch abomination.
“Number 786 of Horde became exile. After failure to consume target mammals exile became Mr. Trash Bags.”
“Okay, then.”
“Protect Cuddle Bunny!” A fourth eye joined the others and they all blinked at me, which was very distracting as I drove a winding country road. “How?”
“That pouch you’re in? The bad guys will take it. You’ve got to flatten yourself so they don’t find you. When you get to the other side, if my baby is there, you protect my baby. Eat the bad guy.”
“Consume!” Then Mr. Trash Bags’ now five eyes looked confused. “Mammals too big?”
Right. He was a fraction of the mighty shoggoth he once was. “Well, you can eat their nose or something. Whatever it takes to distract them and keep my Cuddle Bunny safe.”
“Keep safe Cuddle Bunny.”
“Right. When baby is safe, you can do whatever bad stuff you want to the bad guys. As small as you are right now, ears, eyes, toes, fingers, those are all good targets.”
“Do bad stuff to bad guys.”
I kept repeating my instructions, making sure he understood that the primary mission was protecting Ray and the secondary was getting the artifact back. By the time we rounded Dead Man’s Turn—aptly named, there were lots of accidents there—leading up to the bridge, I was teaching Mr. Trash Bags my phone number and he was chanting it back to me enthusiastically.
I had no idea where they’d take my baby. In the past, the teleportation spells of the type used by the Condition had led to places around our world. Wherever the artifact wound up, I wanted him to be able to call me and tell me where to go. Once he’d memorized the phone number, he asked me what a phone was, then I had to explain that too. And how to use one.
“On box with numbers summon Cuddle Bunny. Purge. Destroy. Consume!”
“And?”
Mr. Trash Bags had to think hard. “Protect?”
“Good.”
I was so screwed.
* * *
I finally got to Crybaby Bridge. It seemed like it had taken forever, but my watch said I still had a few minutes.
The bridge was a fairly normal metal, arched one, the sort you find down a lot of country roads in Alabama. This one was pretty big, and I presumed at some point it had led from somewhere important to somewhere else important. Right now, there was an old abandoned house behind me, a straggle of farms on the other side, and trees everywhere.
Across the bridge was a woman, holding a baby in a blue blanket. I recognized Amanda Fuesting, that child stealing bitch. The blue blanket had been made by Holly during her downtime on the siege. Since quilting wasn’t in the main body of Holly’s skills, it was pretty special to her, and seeing it there just made me even angrier.
Had Amanda been a traitor all along?
At this point I didn’t trust anybody except for myself and the truckload of orcs who’d been following me, who would now be hiding out of sight. Well, I had to trust Mr. Trash Bags…kind of.
The kidnappers knew I was a shooter, so Amanda was standing
on the edge of the bridge. A head shot would flip her off switch, but then she’d take my baby over the side with her. We were maybe twenty feet over the river; a drop was more than sufficient to kill poor little Ray.
I shut off the car and waited a second. Amanda didn’t move. There were good hiding spots all along the river. I could be walking into an ambush. Maybe the second they saw I had what they wanted, it would be my switch that got flipped.
Mr. Trash Bags was in the pouch with the artifact, so I stuck my hand in to check and found that he’d become as thin as the lining. He was warm, and I felt a bizarre tickle on my fingers, like he was licking them or something. When it came to shoggoths, it was better not to think too clearly about what they might be doing. I wiped what was probably spit on my pants, then got out of the car.
I started walking toward them, slowly lifting my hands, one empty, and from the other dangled the bag. My stomach hurt from the tension. “I’ve got what you want.”
Amanda stood very still, and the baby lump in the blanket didn’t move either.
“Amanda,” I said, in case she was another victim, and not a traitor. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
There was no hesitation in the response, as the thing in Amanda’s body laughed, the full, rich sound of a much larger person. “She’s only alive in the basest sense, Guardian. The process of taking over a human mind is a rather violent one. I’m afraid once I release my puppets, there’s usually not much left of their mind. This body is merely a convenient vehicle. You have no friend here, merely a negotiating partner. Now, that’s close enough.”
We were fifty feet apart.
“Did you bring the payment for your baby?”
“Hang on. I need to—”
“Too late,” the thing in Amanda’s body said. It moved fast, grabbing the baby by the ankle, and suspending him over the side of the bridge.
“No!”
It was Ray. No doubt about it. He looked unharmed and very surprised, and as the little quilted blanket Holly had made fell into the river below, Ray gave vent to a scream of outrage and fear, his little lungs laboring overtime to let me know all was not right.
Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC) Page 8
